Spoiled Lunch and Other Creepy Tales

Spoiled Lunch and Other Creepy Tales

By A.E. Hodge

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

The Rollerboard

Spoiled Lunch

The Agoraphobe

In the White Room

The Hunters

The Accident

The Migraine

Sold As Is

Introduction

In this collection, a hungry child in a post-apocalyptic wasteland seeks shelter in the wrong place (The Rollerboard); a school boy in a dystopian world of deadly pests learns to follow the rules the hard way (Spoiled Lunch); a ghost refuses to leave her beloved house (The Agoraphobe); a heroin addict finds himself trapped in a locker room with a talking tapeworm (The White Room); two men on a hunting trip have a personal encounter with the supernatural (The Hunters); a drug runner hits a creature on the road and finds himself pursued by it (The Accident); a test subject in a secret government program learns the true meaning of his migraines (The Migraine); and a girl tries to rid her family’s house of a ghost in Sold As Is.

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The Rollerboard

As the toxic sun settles in its apex over the wasteland, you stumble upon what was once some kind of way station: now it is a midden heap of broken bricks and scattered debris, burnt-out cars and twisted gasoline pumps; a relic of prehistoric America.

You don’t want to get any closer. You know what sort of surprises nest in the cool, dark places: scorpions, sand-wizards, mad mutant cannibals. After all, you are but a child, weak and weary, defenseless since losing your knife against the wild dogs in Reno.

But the hunger cannot be swayed.

You can’t remember the last time you ate. Perhaps it was the dead dog, on the broken road outside Old Vegas. Or the nectar of that sickly green cactus, rich with radiation. But that was days ago, or months. Time seems endless and unsegmented under the white-hot sun. There are no clouds, no ozone, no atmosphere to shade the ultraviolet. There is only the sun, and the hunger, a constant twisting knife in your stomach.

It’s the hunger that drives you closer.

You creep over the splintered asphalt, past twisted metal and shells of car parts from some other world.

Enter the dusty, cave-like doorway, into cool darkness. Shards of glass underfoot announce your every step. There are rows of dented, empty shelves inside, many of them fallen, their contents scattered. Rows of fluorescent lights, long dead, line the cracked and slanted ceiling.

You root through the debris with the toe of your boot: cardboard boxes, rotten packages, scraps of candy wrappers and empty cans—but no food. The packages have all been opened, the food long gone.

You hope whatever opened them isn’t still around.

Outside, the desert wind lifts its voice two octaves. The walls shake. The ceiling groans. A storm is coming, one of the great and endless wind-storms that now circle the globe.

Finally you notice a rusted steel crate, half-concealed under ash and debris near the cashier’s counter. The crate bears a faded red cross and script in an old language—EMERGENCY RELIEF—and your heart leaps up because you’ve seen these crates before. Every survivor has seen these crates. They hold a liquefied algae-based food source from the old world, renewable and nearly endless in shelf-life. Manna, they call it. It is the single most valuable substance left in the world.

With a cry of delight you fall on the crate, spilling it over eagerly.

But all that remains inside is a crib of fat grey ash-worms, each the size of your finger, moist and plump and sallow. The white spots on their heads look like startled eyes. You recoil in disgust and disappointment—but that’s simply instinct. At this point you’ll settle for anything.

The ash-worms slide down your throat so easily you almost can’t taste the oily gasoline flavor.

But it’s not enough. Indeed, it seems to only whet your appetite, honing its sharp insistency.

You search behind the counter and discover a small trapdoor in the wooden floor, perhaps to a cellar. It fills you with unease, but hunger saps your better judgment, and besides, there’s a storm on the way. Where else can you go? Pull open the rust-hinged hatch. Swing over the lip. Descend down the step ladder into darkness.

The shaft below, hewn out of the black desert earth, seems to plunge down a long way. This is no mere cellar, as you’d hoped. It feels like a throat, and you are climbing down into the stomach of the hungry earth.

Your foot touches the bottom, and you turn around. With one hand to the rough wall, you walk tentatively into the utter darkness, your footsteps echoing. You can see nothing, and you have never felt more naked. Any moment your groping hand could land on some poisonous crawler, or a hole could open up in the floor and break your leg.

But the darkness decreases the further you go; suddenly you can discern the uneven walls, their recesses and stalactite pillars. Some curious dim light is coming from beyond a turn ahead.

You creep around the corner, into a little room. On one wall is a slender tube, glowing, not by electricity, but by some inner chemical source of its own. In its light, you see that this room is a residence: there are boxes and empty cans, torn garments, a blanket, a traveling pack…

At the back of the room is a cot; on it, a supine figure.

This residence is occupied.

You nearly panic and run, but then you see something else—there, beside the cot, lies a dead rat.

Instantly you start to salivate, and your stomach lurches hungrily. You can smell the sickly pungent smell of meat from here. You can’t leave it behind. And the sleeper has not yet alerted to your presence.

It’ll be easy: creep in, swipe the rat, and make a break before the stranger even stirs. You brace yourself, and then start forward, careful that your worn-down boots make no sound.

But you see at once that caution is unnecessary. The thing on the cot is a skeleton, its flesh long gone to dust. Only the clothes and blanket draping it give it shape.

You stumble to the rat, a tiny, malnourished thing, and seize it with trembling hands. With no hesitation you bite into its soft underbelly, wrenching away a great mouthful of meat, spitting out the skin and fur. The body is still fresh, only just turning cold. Blood dribbles down your chin. You can taste the sweet innards, the dry tough wires of muscle. This simple pleasure is unsurpassed.

In a matter of moments you’ve gummed and chewed the flesh from the rat’s skeleton, and it looks almost as clean and picked as the human skeleton on the cot. Your jaw is sore from exertion, and in the spaces between your many missing teeth, your gums are bleeding from gnawing the bones.

But still the pains gnaw your stomach, the tiny scraps of rotten meat only serving to stoke your feeding frenzy.

Where did the rat come from?

The cave-like tunnel continues on from this small chamber, crawling down into darkness; was there more meat to be found?

You sit upright and listen, but hear nothing save the wind squealing through the building above. No reason to be afraid. No harm in exploring.

Maybe there will be more food.

God, you need food.

You pry the glowing light-stick from the wall. The strange inner glow dims, but does not go out. You clutch it like a talisman and start down the sloping tunnel, waving the glow-stick to ward off anything living in the dark; but the cave seems strangely empty of scorpions, insects, or other creatures.

Every step is nervous and jumpy. Your senses, honed by past danger, blare like warning sirens, but you can’t turn back.

On the way down, you pass another opening in the tunnel wall, dark like the mouth of a void. Tread lightly, but don’t turn back, even if your heart is suddenly racing here and you can’t say why. Just flee onward.

Soon after, you hear the drip of water. Then the passage opens into a circular chamber. The rock floor is wet; water trickles from a spring in the wall, down into an old moldy bucket. You bring the bucket to your lips, and the taste of water is pure and sweet, not oily, as you’ve grown used to in this dead world. You sip slowly; it’s a struggle not to chug it, but there’s no use making yourself sick.

Finally nervousness makes you lower the bucket and look around the little chamber. You listen. The storm is rising; the sound of squealing wind is loud enough that it seems right behind you now.

Time to go back, before you scare yourself mad down here. You set the bucket down to collect the trickle again, and then start up the tunnel. Echoes of your footfalls follow.

You come again to the opening in the tunnel wall, and slow to a stop. This is the source of your fear. Like a frightened deer, you stare into the dark crevice for a long moment, and then try to run past.

The squealing sound gives chase—not the sound of wind at all, but of wheels—and you look back and some monstrosity is squeezing from the dark crevice, eyes glittering, teeth grinning—

And it’s coming for you, a corpulent thing rolling with grotesque agility on a plywood board on wheels, scrabbling along on its palms, dragging its trunk and the stumps of old legs, coming toward you with a stupid malevolent grin in a face like melted wax, and one of its flapping hands is leading ahead like a feeler, seeking to touch you, and when it does you’ll go insane.

Screaming, you make it to the room at the end of the tunnel—and stumble over the skeleton on its cot, twisting your ankle with a lightning arc of pain as you go down. You claw your fingers into the hard ground and drag yourself away, but you’re too slow, far too slow.

No! you scream. No! Your eyes squeeze shut, unable to watch.

The cold cave-hand clamps on your leg, and by reflex you kick with all your strength. There is a groan of pain muffled as if by cotton,